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About janeadamsart

A sharing from my book of life, most days ~ ~
Drawings, paintings, poetry, bridging east and west ~ ~ I illustrated The Sacred India Tarot, and wrote ... among a few other things ... "The Dreamer in the Dream" (short stories) and "The Reckless Fruit" (a 1960s odyssey of drawings and poetry.)

The Coin of the sages is an alchemist’s gift from heaven. It turns up in any crucible of life and relationships. We polish our old copper coins (Venus) till they shine as the golden Sun.

In an old alchemy journal I found this entry … delicately it interfaces the timeless diary of today. “The Glory of the World” and “The Golden Tripod” which are quoted, are 17th century writings in the Hermetic Museum library. The Tarot keys discussed are in the Builders of the Adytum deck.

BOTA Tarot Tableau: three septenaries, seven columns: the keyboard. This deck is published by the Builders of the Adytum in black and white: each student colours and thereby empowers his or her own deck, following the Builders’ strict guidelines. The colours of the Keys have audial resonance also.

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8 March 2003 COIN

The ripe Priestess sometimes makes Hermit’s Mountain seem remote … winnowing out error and shattering the Tower. These three Keys form a vertical column in the BOTA Tarot Tableau. In fact they represent the bud, the bloom and the bursting of the seedcase as from chrysalis … in nature and in any creative process.

Beginning my Sapphire Tree painting for a book cover: I started as blind egoists do on the dirty surface. This should grow organically from centre as a mandala — not in one rush like a face. Sapphire means liquid pale blue fire. The 72 leaves should be a delicate tracery of seminal wave connections in the white fire around and between the Menorah branches. Working from the centre outwards, let it grow. Here is a dirty pool. Cleanse to begin with, its centre.

Paul Foster Case invites me again to dip into the alchemical forests of “GLORY OF THE WORLD”. When reading these, fountain gently with them up and down, restoring the synchrony of heart-body which is today collapsed and tired.

On page 61 it discusses the COIN OF THE SAGES. I can see this white Coin from the sky, so bright that I cannot see yet what is impressed upon it.

Our Stone has its head in the earth and its root in the air. I read alchemical texts not with my Hod but with the breath, with my inside. Then they glow. It says the Spirit delights in nothing so much as its own Soul and its own body. Delight is another word for the Higher Will; be comforted. It is minted pure and bright and white within the dark. Begin from the centre
but let it descend first from the white sun. The work ofthe Priestess lets it descend. 10am, School of the Soul.

Priestess, King of Swords and the Fool, 1987

The Priestess, Rosy Cross and Fool descending – 2003

September 2018 – The evolution of those two drawings (1987 and 2003) is my life today – the heart beats within the tapestry. A house to paint in, which I invoked 15 years ago and forgot about, recently materialised; last week I beeswaxed the floor and began work there with a new Tree of Life – see end of this post. I have not painted for years!

new art-room

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2003 continued:

Hurly Burly welcomed her Mum so kindly last night at the Garrick wine-bar – Mum was feeling lousy because she’s forgotten how to paint. HB too has been re-discovering how to paint — the light came in through her window. I had a nice time there where she works, but ate and drank too much, which paralyses my gut for the night. But to read the “Golden Tripod” now, sprays white light into the Garrick; and I was introduced to a curly Paddy who has 400 (?) paintings he said he bought and collected in his house — the secret of a good painting is it invites you to take a walk into it. Tall tales do not matter in conversation. On my right, as I tackled warm goat’s cheese and fennel swordfish and a big glass of wine, sat Marta’s sister with her hyperactive three-year-old son Adam enjoying himself all over the counter with his tiny neat brown hands.

Enough: now focus on Basil Valentine.

It is impossible for Yesod to sperm the Stone. Yesod cannot remember how. The sperming comes down through antakharana – the pipeline – and is observed and — as perception of it refines and begins to dispel the obscuring cloud — obeyed with joy: as in p.45 in the Golden Tripod. Note the Source of the Priestess’s stream and her receiving element. Male and female seed are the One thing, the Child within. Wherever there is joy in creation is this natural intercourse of the Air, the secret fire, the dew. The Earth is only the invisible thing that attracts union. Out of no thing blossoms unicity.

Seek not our Stone in substances which cannot stand the test of fire. Seek it in the incombustible oil that is the fire itself that ever renews and fattens the land. It grows and gently shines and increases like a plant. It increases in that it prevails. Through all darkness, the stem glows and shines.

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September 2018

Here is the beginning of my new Tree painting – just sketching out Malkuth, Yesod, Hod, Netzach in the Lower Face, based on carvings of the Companions around Chartres cathedral; Archangel Rafael in Hod has no face yet. I hope for it to combine thematically the medieval flowering of Islamic alchemists and Christian sages, the Star, Cross and Crescent, the child and parenting, the cosmic serpent of our DNA, nature and the fountain of life … as the journey begins, let it lead me where it will.

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Life has been too full-on for me to keep up with my blog posting. But a month or two ago, I posted in my other blog Aquariel about a pair of Tarot oracles in June and July. Here are the three links:

For Gaia
janeaquariel.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/summer-oracle-1-for-gaia/

Early this year I took a few climbing lessons at the age of 69 – inspired by family developments. I used to be a fair tree-climber and sea-cliff scrambler; I dislike any form of mechanical or competitive exercise. At Swiss Cottage climbing centre in London I learned to manage the rope and belay a climber safely, and to climb a wall and to abseil down it. I felt scared but each time I came away with a stretch of freedom in my spine – like a cat. I was hooked. Recently I started at the Castle climbing centre at Manor House near Finsbury Park. I go alone, to practice bouldering and to watch.

The Castle is an old pumping station, built as a huge Victorian folly with turrets and three towers – a handsome building. Some 20 years ago it was leased from English Heritage and turned into reputably the most varied indoor climbing centre in the land. It stands in an acre of organic garden; all the food is home grown and the place is run on self-sustaining lines.

I would like to be at the Castle all day, take some good reading and find a nook between scrambles, like writing in a coffee shop. I could alternate climb-stretch exertions and scribing. Yesterday I kept getting bored and tired and then caught up in it again. Perhaps I want someone to do it with. A brand-new bouldering room is about to be opened.

And … why not sketch? … from life! I just did these from photos. Keep practicing.

How odd that I was so snooty about the climbing centre my niece took me to, many years ago – somewhere in the east end. She and her man monkeyed sleekly up and down fierce looking walls. When I had a go I hated it. There was no sea-breeze cliff or moorland view to lift or inspire my dragging body weight, no rock for fingers to love, just dead cement and coloured toy holds. I felt like a stone. I was amazed at the guys climbing along the ceiling like spiders. I thought they were fanatics.

These two “boulders” on the 1st floor at the Castle are called Lust and Envy. They are great. I spend a lot of time on those – but not between them!

You know … in rock climbing for senior moments, don’t just try to complete a traverse or a wall; be inventive with the holds and their funny shapes, seek out different things with them, stay on the spot, find out what my toes can do. That pleasing tingling ache in my hands develops finger strength – the same delicate dexterity for playing the piano. Blood flow increases and differentiates the tendons. Walk tall! Feet strengthen also. Can stand tippy-toes better than before, I think. Body core – gravity centre – I was aware of this many times yesterday when moving laterally. I picked up some tips while watching rock climbing videos online. Sooner or later I will strike up a friendship or join a rope or get myself a lesson with one of the helpful staff. Wait and see. Right now my whole body is delighted to be doing this. I like the chalky smell there, and sometimes they play cool sounds. In the 2nd-floor cafe is excellent coffee and restorative peanut bars to eat while watching high and daring ascents with rope and pitons Nearby is a kid’s wall which I scramble up and down. I love watching the kids; they come with their teacher and scamper all over the sheer slabs – I never grew up!

We older folk are sensitive or rugged individual types … the sweetness of the solitude on distant fells comes to this place, to keep in trim.

What do my molecules, cells, nerve fibres and enzymes of the Great Change feel about it? I am a stretchy amoeba pattern of trillions of stars. That’s nice – try to recall that, next time! I would like my climbing to be contemplative as the technique slowly enters my bones. Yesterday it felt like stepping back. At Swiss Cottage wall earlier this year, they said when you are learning you progress for a couple of sessions and then it seems you slip back and that’s natural because next time it is suddenly easier. The oscillation moves forward and back, like when hung on a difficult place. New agilities being built take time. The muscle while developing is young, hard and unwieldy. It needs to loosen into itself and become flexible, for the flexibility and grace is power. These are lessons for life.

Line dance, 1988. When I drew these, I felt wonderful afterwards. It flowed and danced up the street within me. There is nothing like “creating energy” by taking a line for a walk to see where it might go. As far as I remember, I drew these slowly, consciously, on the edge of exploration; that is what released their energy.

It is the same principle my David talked about, re any kind of physical exercise: don’t do it every day, take days off in between for the agility to develop as a whole. While at rest, it sinks in to build new cells.

The same principle guides the inner work. The Spirit is in charge. Awaken to it! Advise and entice my stellar amoeba over the playground; then rest. I guess as I cultivate my slow and dainty deliberation, the technique will come, because rock climbing isn’t with brute strength but with coordination. Coordination is the core. The core gets blissed out when she is filled with the inner star. The beautiful lesson of Life: Core Strength, let go and watch her reach and swing and flow. Surprise! Delight!

Hey, Gene Key 55! Richard Rudd’s talk of molecules and blood circulation in the music of change brought to my mind a starfish. “The human being is nothing more than a symphony of interwoven rhythms, tempos and sounds.” A robin calls outside: and Clive who loves Richard Jeffries, records vibrant birdsongs on his website Art in Nature. DNA is structured in triplets. All our relationships are triadic. Musical form is ABA with C. Abac-us.

I like my primary-coloured abacus and its beads. The magus – my inner teacher – is getting interested and encourages me with the climbing.

You know it is such a chance for magic – the inner plane – to river into embodiment and to fill flesh, bone and sinew with stars and to know and respect the tired crystals in our blood: the imagination illumines.

She is the beginning, and out of her unbounded oceanic “confusion” the male arises to differentiate and gather it into a distaff – Siva’s still point within the centre of each wheel within wheels. The feminine Sakti movement giving birth to and generated through the stillness, plays on the loom of numberless threads.

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View from Near Hope gill, Lake district

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom. See also Aquariel

A reading from Caitlin & John Matthews’ Arthurian Tarot (cut deck once into centre of pile, right and left hands)

Re-reading some old writings in 2005 about 2012 and the ending of the Mayan calendar, I found a forgotten practical insight: to realign each day my “human terrestrial axis” imaginatively to the galactic core.

The actual picture we were given was: in December 2012 the configuration of planets interacting with stellar influences might pull our planet into a more upright position relatively. Indeed the astrology during that time was quite loaded, an “eggs in one basket” situation with the Moon moving through those energy fields. This could indicate a symbolic or gradual polar-axis alignment with galactic centre – perceived not geo-physically but as an evolving consciousness.

To uplift and straighten my spine with polar axis is a quiet conscious work. The same force of Nature in ages past raised early homo sapiens to stand and walk upright. I have to keep reminding myself, as I keep forgetting … the “Schumann resonance” – Gaia’s slow pulse or wavelength; to lean with the mast of the Grail ship.

The idea of Earth’s polar axis tilting physically was – as I thought at the time – a naive and literal interpretation of the transcendent view which is: Gaia’s subtle body moves into an altered resonance with her cosmic environment. In physical terms, this takes place in waves over a geological period of generations.

“The slow change of the angle of the axis of the earth with respect to the centre of the galaxy will bring no ill effects. As far as Mother Nature goes, it is business as usual. The sun continues to shine, the earth continues to spin, and the four seasons continue to transform from one into another. … Once a year the earth orbits into the special position that creates the galactic alignment, and once every 26,000 years this happens at virtually the same moment as the winter solstice.”

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12 sphere Tree of Life

The above is extracted from http://www.mysticmamma.com/solstice-12-21-12-end-restart-of-mayan-calendar-galactic-alignment/ – which contains an article by Thomas Razzeto in 2008. Because of the time lapse since then, I slightly abridged it.

He continues by describing as a “sacred tree” the sunrise procession of planets on 2012 solstice through the ecliptic path which crosses the Milky Way’s dark centre. At solstice noon the sun transited the core point – as I understand it, a subtle but powerful event through all the planes. “The Mayan sacred tree is an astronomical reference to the cross made by galactic equator and the ecliptic path of the Sun as seen from Earth, near the centre of the galaxy. The sacred tree is part of the fixed background of the stars. Its shape and location with respect to the other stars never changes.

“We should consider the location of the centre of the galaxy as the Mayan womb of creation. On this day at this time, it is at the bottom acting as the source, the root system of the sacred tree. So everything comes from source into our world of duality. What a beautiful metaphor! This makes much more sense than the false yet often repeated statement that the sun would be on top of the centre of the galaxy on this special day.

“When we look at the configuration at midday – the moment of the Sun’s greatest strength – we have the sacred tree being exhibited in an extremely interesting way. When we consider the Sun’s presence in the middle of the dark rift while it is also in the middle of those four planets (Venus, Mercury, Pluto, Mars), I think we have found something that is quite remarkable. … We have the opportunity to align our thoughts and vibrations with others who wish the same for our planet.” (Copyright Thomas Razzeto 2008).

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This is a process to feel or empathise intuitively, rather than try to analyse. Light is born through darkness. Time dissolves into cyclic presence. As the 2012 concentric continues to realign our axial relationship, I think we should listen more to this tender point in ourselves each winter and each summer, and keep still. It may be that more terrestrial tremors develop at solstices where there is increased sensitivity to magnetic realignment. We may watch and see and be shown. In the sacramental consciousness, no humanity or atom of nature is separate.

Initially the impact is subjective: an addictive acceleration – an interactive and reactive technology overload. Terrestrial beings who will not or cannot harmonise with the holistic shift, are flung onto the illumined stage periphery; they may live violently, acting out the drama we desire to watch and to entertain ourselves with; or they may suffer the pressure and upheaval. Precisely the same rattling disturbs my lower mind.

The lower frequency (individual and collective) in disarray and discord shows in high-relief, man’s inhumanity to man and to the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms.

I am organically interwoven with this as a Sun-Moon Capricorn/Cancer with five planets in earth signs. Through frequent fatigue and my lower mind’s dismal chatter, I am yet aware during the years since 2012 of a progressive widening of the gap between my view of things and the mainstream worldview. The distorted media version is here today and gone tomorrow; keeping my ear to the ground, I pick up only what is needful, to be informed.

Capricorn glyph with Hermes Trismegistos, 1988

It was said in the earlier days, ”In the rollercoaster through the Photon Belt, those who evolve will tend to detach and stand aside from those who regress or exploit others at any level.” We observe the polarisation in the politics, in land management and in business. The new and slowly growing holistic principle is profoundly philanthropic; the grass-roots flourish through my own extended family. Only connect …

At the same time I ask myself where and how do I engage with the regressive element and the agony of its victims and the homeless, as I am challenged with it daily? It is like two sides of a widening crevasse or bergschrund dividing the mountain from the glacier; that great split is bridged for we are One. The delineation and its depth are clear.

Master R said in 1947 … “Ours is no work of other worlds and planes. Here on this weeping, suffering earth, is where the Shrine of Love must be built, and built with action, not alone with words … The can opener of the intellect is too dull to probe the secrets of the Heart of Life. Knowledge goes deeper than statement. Love, and you shall know … Thy pain is my pain, thy sorrows pierce my heart. I stand not aloof.”

Photo from dylanontherocks.wordpress.com

long ridge near Hope Gill, Lake district Cumbria (photo by JA, April 2018)

The real meaning of “Ascension” and the grounded Book of Revelation is – a daily grind!

Ascension is not “ascent” so much as discovering the path along the mountain. Ascension draws the Light deep into the ground. I take responsibility for the illumining and clearing of my shadow and of ancient habits. My tiny spine is Gaia’s – the invisibly vast polar axis with Her magnetic fields and shields and Aurora. This perception throws up and out the baggage on the beach. Many of us must embrace and clarify big relationship Karmas and their wounds as a whole at this point in time. I evolve not through denial but through forgiving. It is no use to pass the buck! It is no use to paste it onto a mythical “Them” out there, or “They” in all our discontented issues and habits of speech. The Change in humankind begins nowhere else but here: in myself and in yourself. There is no time like the present connectivity. There is no time but the present.

My father once visited a Buddhist Rishi who replied, “The past is gone. The future hasn’t happened yet. The present is Now. Don’t waste it!”

Ascension is your and my compass: compassion.

Connect around the pyramid – a drawing I did for my father for Xmas 1987

A hidden quantum of lighthouse-keepers in the Change reaches critical mass. There is no single event; there is a decade, a generation, a lifetime’s curve of changes in attitude to our environment. The atrocities I see and am distressed by only emphasise the bigger picture of the Change at all levels, throughout the human gene pool.

Stained glass at St Monica’s church, Palmers Green in London. This is no crucified Christ but one who strides from the tomb, embracing all the worlds

Uranus entered Taurus last week; he will traverse this threshold back and forth for a year or two, before proceeding into the springtide deep within Earth’s flowering. Though there will continue to be battles with land grabbers, we are likely to witness an “unexpected” collective turning point as the Gaia awareness gains environmental strength; a hands-on questioning of our use of fuel and food and its waste. The brakes were on for decades – the juggernaut against the brake, an immense friction of scorched tyres – but from about here the whole thing begins to slow down. Slow down! Personal and collective history demonstrate that we human beings individual and collective do not change and grow until it is unendurable for us not to.

What is the Gaia consciousness? For me, my spine, my core, is Earth’s: and Earth’s alignment with the Solar system’s flower of orbits and magnetic fields, and with the galaxy and other stellar systems.

We humans are in no atom separate from nature, the soil, bird, beast, insect and rock forms. We humans are in no atom separate from Earth’s internal dark magma – our unconscious – which bursts like a phoenix into fire and light the instant it encounters air … the song of the breath. We humans are in no atom separate from our roads and our heavy buildings and our parasitic tourism and our blinkers.

Biro-amour drawing for David by Tony Wigg. The Greek lettering is ‘Phallos’ whose root ‘Shines’: the verb moves but does not name or fix the light. In the magma sphere within earth’s mantle, there is no air for light to exist. The analogy is with the subconscious ignition of creative imagery. Darkness holds the Shining within itself.

We humans along with all organisms are her breath, her pulse. Wherever possible, if your life is inextricably busy, accelerated or pressured, pause for just a moment: slow down to reflect a detail or be silent. Creatures in the woodland stop their foraging, to look around … until the active fountain rises again within them. Be refreshed.

These brief openings will grow in due course, and join up like the blue sky through clouds. Join hands with all of us who try to do this as and when we can. In the inevitable flowering of Logres, find and cherish the Grail vessel in a hillside brook, and dip to drink. Although poisonous and persuasive, the economic and military juggernaut fights for existence as it dies. So called world leaders and magnates are puppets. They do me a favour: they show me my hard drive. Where am I greedy? Where do I want more and more? It is actually a dream. It is hard to wake up; but glimpses come like shafts of sunlight through nature’s canopy.

KEEP SEEING AND KEEP GOING AND KEEP PRACTICING.

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Ramana Maharshi with young squirrel

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom. See also Aquariel

Let my face cave into your SELF.
Every picture of my thought
spills out of being wordless.

Let my fear of you go,
let lion talk. Let the lion see.
The sun doesn’t bother what goes on
when it rises and sets on earth.

The disk of the world’s hidden side
is a darkness on my light.
The wonder of that silent spreading corona
pulls away the cloth behind my eyes.

I have no support. The saying stops.Let soles of my feet be eyesto see and love, pick up the ground.

The darkness on the sun
is angel’s finger on my lips
stopping speech, making me hear.

I wonder much at my concerns.
As the reel unrolls, I clench in my seat
so forming views ; the Inward, inexpressiblegift of the holy, returnsas soon as I go.
No matter what happens
to me, my walls arise and fall, like
Rome on the ocean wave.

The safety in just looking
has no sense at all.
It takes the risk,
the leaping
of the absolute deer

and skittering over the threshold
pushed, each moment
opens from each point
of space a bright DAN DE LION —
Be brave ! be bold ! be
absent !
Let it go !

When chimerae collide
in the upkeep clashing, let
the Lion see
how in relationship,
several masks combine,
clashing and colliding
anxiety and peace.

Thrice Great Hermes said, “For never … can an embodied soul that has once leaped aloft, so as to get a hold upon the truly Good and True, slip back into the contrary.”

This is a profound Law. Note he said ‘embodied’. He didn’t say ‘without the body’ (as in trance or nirvana). He said in effect, Leap with hands and feet into the heart of God. That is an osmotic shift in the atom of human consciousness as a whole. The membrane, the veil is semi-permeable. There is no way the sap of the Tree of Life can run back downward. The ascension pulls it through the cells; a vacuum which it must follow and flow into. Once you are through, you know that everyone comes through it sooner or later. There are certain old clothes which are impossible to wear. Love is no longer a thing of the movies.

Considering Chopin whom I am starting to sketch … his music was and is pure female opera song: his unique ability to let them out of his bag; his passion for singers, their lovely companionship and their voice which did such things. Perhaps he might admire but could not love a woman who did not sing? George Sand was probably not a singer (or perhaps she was?) – she called a spade a spade; her yang complemented his yin; they may have had deep Karmic business in their attraction field. One of the two sketches I did last night, while watching this video, is from hers of him. From their liaison in Majorca came the tender Preludes which I used to play and to love dearly. I have an old recording of Arrau playing them. In one of them he throws a fiery tantrum, and my father used to mimic in falsetto George’s shock: “Frederick!”

The journey up the Tree of Life through osmotic membranes is continuous, and there are obstacles – veils or resistances, a sort of grey chaos like my head-cold just now, through which the flowers spike their way. These things come in waves. When an inner contact is brewing, it brings some obscuring resistance to clear or blast off. Through the snot and tissues, the irrepressible florets … make a baby sneeze. The rising sap is a fountain of little fishes. Not one of them can turn round and go back to the sack. When the One which is ‘I’ reaches egg … PRESTO bellissima! Nothing is EVER the same again.

Generally speaking, the course of life is a series of these small hiccups. Perhaps jnana (wisdom) is a state where they all join up and nothing is the same again EVER, and it is always like this: the living and dying and letting go. Robert Adams in Arizona looked like this. He had no teeth when he said, “it has no end. No end.”

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I imagine the extra terrestrial intelligences which interweave with ours, have that form of expansion which to us is liberation. I imagine they move with our magidim and guardian angels easily, for the wavelength doesn’t limit the concepts. The Presence of the aumakua varies only by local interest from galaxy to galaxy. Holding my coloured lamp which invites them and rebuffs tricksters, I imagine them freely filling the spatial interstices in the room. I may not have the gift of seeing their forms, but perhaps I can converse receptively with their mystery.

Fred Hoyle wrote a novel (1950s) of a close approach to Earth, of this kind. When it connected to the intellectual brain only, it drove it insane. The acceleration which is pure Consciousness can however be contained in the breathing heart body: the heart or solar plexus mind (awakening silence which loves).

In this light, what is the accelerative frequency which plagues the human engineering at the present time, and where can it be accommodated? Food for thought!

It drives many of us insane, particularly those whose incentive is to destroy their neighbours and environment. These processes are cosmic eyeblinks; we endure their unfolding for decades and sometimes centuries. Into their unfolding the threads of millennia are drawn. Nothing of what is seen today can be interpreted unless we rise above it and get some glimpse of the landscape from elevation. The landscape looks like the Andean Nazca lines, criss-crossing the ridges and plateaux. To read this map would require a four-dimensional understanding of acupunctural meridians or the nadis of yoga, applied to the leylines of earth and through history’s points of intersection. An acceptance that the map is of that dimension assists the contact of Higher Mind with a tiny bee in the earth hive. Most accounts of Self knowledge say we should fall open into knowing nothing. Then that by which I am known, can get to work.

Meister Eckhart said, “God does his deepest work in the soul when she is at rest.”

The alchemical maxim is: Art begins where nature ceases to act. The Hermetic soul begins where human intellect lets go. I could study books about Nazca lines and Nadis, but I don’t wish to fill up my thought again with issues whose complexity generates karma by psychological default. I now see clearly the last twenty years since I suddenly downloaded a lot of knowledge and started to see. The light ‘grounded’ through some intense liaisons. It had to materialise.

In the olden days, the rishis sat under trees and went about their lives and adored the sunrise and their cows: their loving heart saw and knew the All, because it is in our DNA. This faculty has not changed, deep down. The sensitive veins to it are reopened, by keeping quiet. This is what the alchemists call, “the miners of the mountains”. It is all within us when we become still and look.

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Aruna is red fire,Achala is standing still,becoming a sacred hill, Arunachala, kind to kinewhose milk is the morning stream from Vedic stars.

The cow in Vedic hymn is sacred, pure light milked in pail by Upanishadic seers,and a drove of cattle clouds at dawn, are gods that glow around her rising star.

In countless talesthe un-created cracked the sky;but my silence of no angel’s feathers is drawn to see or sensesmall feathers fall in place,whether or not resolving.

1999, Poems of Eclipse

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It is the human predilection on the surface to keep busy. That is OK. Our bodies and our skills need location and exercise. Ramana Maharishi used to say that for those born in the west, to have to live the busy western mindset was their Sadhana or spiritual practice. For those born in the east, their Sadhana was through ashram discipline along Yogic paths. I sense the interplay and often collision of the western and eastern paths, permeated now by communication technology. Blavatsky brought them together in the 19th century; J Krishnamurti lived the way the eastern and western ways ‘clap hands’.

Yet further east I hear the koan: sound of one hand clapping. Koans are designed for the mind’s habit to fall apart; and the existential koan is Love.

Athene was the Greek warrior goddess. She might correspond to India’s Durga. Her magnificent grey eyes were filled with light; she came across the seas, larger than life, to inspire Perseus and other heroes on their dangerous odyssey. She lent them her weapons, her bearskin and Hermes’ gold sandals and cloak of invisibility. Her creature is the Owl. May her wisdom be our courage.

When I was a child, reading Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes, I copied out my favourite pages from the tale of Perseus and the Gorgon – how we face our shadow – and illustrated them. Botticelli’s allegorical painting of Pallas Athene and the troubled man who is half a horse, puzzled me.

I had last year in the back of my mind’s eye, Athene’s face as she strokes the centaur’s head. When I was small, my grandmother must have told me the story, because always since then, I hear her crisp voice explaining this picture, perhaps she talked to me about the shield and the bearskin and the centaur and the spear. Later, I learned to read. An archetype behind my grandmother’s presence – the true picture (like a Botticelli or Leonardo) -transcends the suggestive physical form. The Presence of that art stood subtly behind Helen Ede’s face, her flavour and her voice.

Each child has a special feeling for her grandmother perhaps. This is my own.

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The painting by Sandro Botticelli

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One of my versions, in 1987. I too was on my inner journey …

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… to mend my dolls.

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I set forth into life, with Athene’s blessing and Hermes’ sandals

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Do I learn from books, or do I really look and see? Wake up!

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Here are Ceres and John, the deep unfolding bud within Revelation.

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When I did this drawing – copying Botticelli’s – towards the end of last year, the allegory or mystery within it came up to the touch. She seems to raise the human animal body with all its memory and mythos, through levels of awakening: they behold one another, astonished. I particularly enjoyed drawing the centaur.

It was very difficult for me to draw Athene. When she at long last began to look like a goddess (not Botticelli’s look-like, but in her own right) I became deeply interested in the Centaur. With him, the painting’s archetypal resonance emerges. He is the daemon, the living creature of the woods: his face is twisted like a root: he is as we were when the Spirit world still shone through our irregular features – a tall, noble, careworn personage, Cheiron who guided the Argonauts from his cave on Mount Pelion. In the original Botticelli, he looks tall and spacious, but when I try to draw him, I discover his horse-body is a Shetland pony – short legs and haunches at the level of Athene’s knees. So his distortion and its strange natural beauty in the Botticelli is curious: the man body is long and powerful: the horse body small and sturdy.

Try to imagine him here in this room: great Devic man of the woods on a little Sheltie’s short legs which (relatively) scuttle him along like a small dog.

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I always imagined Centaurs as the proud neck of great stallions who leap fallen trees and rocks effortlessly, read the stars and regard bipeds with disdain. This one’s human body is outsize. Athene in my drawing is super-human size, she has very big feet. She is a goddess. I used to love the leaves and flowers on her shining dress. Her face was rather grown up and sorrowful. In my rendering, it is sensual like a female Pan, an awakened child, a bit like Botticelli’s earthy angels. She gazes wonderingly at the Centaur creature whose dark locks of hair she strokes – in my drawing she might pull his hair, gently draw him up to her height, to be seen. She seems to unmask nature. Her presence and touch lifts him from small pony body (or cart-horse) to the godlike stature of human, and still he is uncoiling from his shy woodland state: he shields himself like Adam and Eve: he twists like an old tree. His eyes and consciousness do not know what or Who this is, that lifts, shines and troubles him.

The allegory is now clear to me. Like the Birth of Aphrodite, it is another portrait of Renaissance in the collective soul-body at the time. I am fascinated by his daemon woodiness and the idea that in any sylvan glade in the woods, these two might emerge through transpositions of the light.

In the painting they are on the shore of a lake by a temple; in the distance behind them sails a little boat. In my mind’s eye they are deep in the woods, among the trees. My early impress of childhood awakens to a transformed sound: as I began to draw the Centaur, I heard and felt the ‘quickening’ in my body. It is easier and a relief to draw his battered face than to try to represent a Botticelli beauty … I had a long struggle with her. He is of the curled roots and loamy sharp smells of the woods. Pan-like, he gives me his energy.

Like when I copied Botticelli’s Primavera Mercury some years ago, I understand God’s ‘twist’ and brush-stroke in our design, which we endure: body’s spiral movement – face’s anxious uplift – essential in the overall design to support it like a pillar, like Atlas.

Mercury – Hermes – copy after Botticelli’s Primavera

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A week or two later, I did the same drawing, this time with my left hand. Why? Because my left hand – the surfacing subconscious or feminine, has not yet acquired bad habits. It is less facile, so it is aware. The lines come from within, slow, sensitive and deliberate, I seem to see where they should go. I didn’t have to erase much.

Centaur and Athene after Botticelli – drawn with left hand

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Athene herself looks amazed at what she uncovers. It is related to her allegories of unmasking with Perseus and the Gorgon, and to my feeling with this drawing. Her shield and bears-head and owl are not visible, but all are implied in her raising of the Centaur to the light. In my right-hand version, there wasn’t much room on the paper to draw her big axe-head on the staff she holds, and there was no room at all for the Centaur’s bow.

Centaurs are the Sagittarian Archer. Traditionally the Sags are small, dark and lithe, and swift with their arrows which travel far … until they reach the Saturn field of Capricorn. In winter there is this tidal pressure and restraint: centrifugue and centripetal movement, Jupiter and Saturn across the Tree: winter.

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Aphrodite comes ashore with shadow.

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Hear the sea. Walk in the sand.

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Copy of Sandro Botticelli’s self-portrait detail from “Adoration of the Virgin”

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

For me the solidarity awoke when I opened another greenpeace email. It used the word ‘we shall defeat …’ This stirred me deep inside. I’ve been feeling defeated. What I stand for had taken a knocking. Wake up and fight! Fight, using my weapons as an artist. I thought of a young mother who lived for years in fear, her family hounded from one mountain village to another. When she decided to join her husband’s resistance party, and train to be a warrior, she was no longer negatived, she was positively charged, in tune with her destiny and the collective. The worm turns.

With HOPE we resurrect the Star … shoulder to shoulder; action.

I’m not very keen on yet more large crowds, politics and organisations. But this is a time to look carefully at where my values truly are, and NOT feel ‘defeated’, and to act with whatever way small or large, is given.

SOUND THE TRUMPET! – with Purcell’s bright anthem “make the list’ning fields rebound!” Do sing and dance with this magical clip! At school, I did Purcell’s Come Ye Sons of Art for music A Level, long ago. My sister and I sang to each other Sound the Trumpet over the washing up … like they do here.

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Gabriel’s bright horn in tarot Key 20, opens the graves and changes the level of consciousness. This arcanum holds a mantric vibration running all the way down the fire-stick into earth. In days of old they twirled a rod in dry wood for fire, and danced, stomped and chanted rhythmically. The archangel’s trumpet note is uniquely for you and uniquely for me: each of us as we are born … and reborn. Find and hear it every day; learn well what it means and is for you. Then blow it back to the trump and be of good cheer! It is energising to have a clear common objective. It raises our voice from the shadows into the light.

But take a good long look at what’s going on in my blind spot – the log in my own eye – before I start projecting it outward. Then, and only then – the principle may get to work; with love.

By paradox, what Mr Red Rag represents, may supply a catalyst for freedom to emerge from the wood. Better to have it out in the open, than trip over it in the dark. Knowing what we see and what we feel, we build on that. We sing to the moon, we run with the Silver Wolves, we care for our young. There is joy and clarity in the coming together. Each day raise the level again; keep walking, keep loving the work we do, and each other, keep it going, keep doing.

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silver wolf and moon

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Dancing with Pan, 1987

My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

Tarot Keys Tower, Star and Moon, representing the paths on the Tree which converge on Netzach

These three Tarots tell me a story: the cracking of the seedcase, the watering of the shoot, the evolutionary journey to ripen. When the Tower falls, it reveals its inversion, a well.

I was thinking along the archetypal lines of 2016, 2017 … and today brought a link to a colour meditation on the same theme, which feels timely:http://colourconscious.com/aura-soma/2017-a-year-for-the-star/ … “By listening to our star and living our truth we take responsibility for the only part that is truly in our hands …” (Dominic Yeoman)

Arranged here in a six pointed star – the Seal of Solomon – is a visual analogy that natural man is the seed-case of the spiritual man. I’m a dull stick these days. “Philosophus” means cultivating clarity, and the word is derived from Philo Sofia – lover of wisdom … “who might be compared to a man who has learned to read the architect’s plans. The house is yet to build.”

What is clarity? Clarity is a process of alignment, perhaps a desire to contribute to a positive humanity, a collective Lighthouse.

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Lighthouse by my brother Simon, circa 1965

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This morning I seemed to be mouldering in a puddle – recovering from seasonal flu. Then I thought of the Lighthouse: a reflective focus. Its shaft, its beam, penetrates the ocean depth and crosses the sea. If I focus on that and give it time, my thought moves from fog into ‘precision tools’, into the quickening of community. As I open into interior silence, I wait: have faith: give it space. The lenses above and below, converge.

click on image to view

Lighthouse under water by Tony Wigg 2016

sketch of alfred wallis 2016

lighthouse with golden birds 2016

The lighthouse shaft underwater, releases a flow of strength. Pictures are resurrected, taking on vibrance and meaning. “May God be resurrected and his foes perish … (Psalms). As wax melts before the flame, as smoke is driven by the wind …”

RESURRECT … and my dark sloth slithers off the branch. There is a golden sound now in the Archangel pouring quintessential water and fire onto muddy Leo and Scorpio creatures … beneath the shadow of his iridescent wings and rainbow … dipping his toe in the bottomless brook: “Guidance is not a mere article of faith. It is a matter of daily personal experience.”

When it connects, it feels like scales dropping off as the Sun dawns. There is a beautiful enigma with the androgyne who dances within the laurel of the World, and with the Children in their field: they sparkle through the dew. The smiling sunflowers all (except one – ) turn their faces to the children – the Seed of the Sun. One sunflower-head watches the Sun, for form’s sake. The childrens’ whole sexuality is in bud. My fields are irrigated with the golden flow of their joy. The world is darkened, but so is the closed interior of the unbroken seed. The seed breaks into halves and into children.

In a nutshell, duties to life and community are perceived in a flash, which take time, labour and obscurity to realise.

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The dawn comes. I have to approach it again and again and again. To repeat by turning back the page to see what I wrote before – or what anyone else wrote – is not sufficient. The key is turned afresh, to enlighten. I have no illusions the enlightenment will last but it doesn’t matter: it will come again. The Oracle never clones itself.

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Child and Grandmother, 2016

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The other 3 Keys (in the sextet above, in this post) are Death, the Star and the Chariot. Death scythes the fertile ground. The Star waters it. The Chariot stands like a hyacinth or … a lighthouse with its keeper inside.

Go into the lamp room with its lenses and reflectors. It is simple. Light a candle, light my fire and let it travel across the sea. Light it with a match or knock a spark from two flints. The spark is within the stone (I wrote snow), like the flame within the wood, the cream within milk, the Upanishad. The spark is Netzach on the Tree, the mating game … only connect.

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Netzach, Hod, Temperance on the Tree

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In the hells on earth, there are gleams here and there, which give an individual some strength to carry his child or to care for another; persons leave their homes and go out into the thick of it. The manna is directed into the core of Hope in the human seed.

What is the Star of Hope? Hope is not an abstract. Hope is the capacity to transfigure a dark situation into a light one. Hope illumines the dark and turgid, and dispels hatred and fear. One moment I am dead. The next moment I am alive and kicking. This is Hope.

This is what is meant by the Star … the star the Magi followed. Hope is an irrigation, converting desert into orchard and oasis. It can begin nowhere else but here.

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Elisa & Mary in Iona – 2016

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My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

At first, there is no bark,
there is the naked
pipe of a silver soaring tree
beyond my speech.

The standing flows
and flutes
the tap root of my soul
upturned.

from Poems of Eclipse

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My adventure invites fellow travellers. I am a poet, an artist and a seer. I welcome conversation among the PHILO SOFIA, the lovers of wisdom.

This blog is a vehicle to promote also my published work – The Sacred India Tarot (with Rohit Arya, Yogi Impressions Books) and The Dreamer in the Dream – a collection of short stories (0 Books). Watch this space.